HHS calls MIT professor ‘more than qualified’ for advisory panel and calls ‘attacks’ on him ‘politically motivated’

The MIT professor who has been appointed by Robert F Kennedy Jr to review the safety of Covid-19 vaccines has failed to meet basic scientific standards in his own research on the topic, according to more than a dozen scientists and public health experts.

Retsef Levi, an operations management professor, is a member of the US health department’s vaccine advisory committee (ACIP) which is meeting later this month and – many experts fear – could seek to rollback recommendations on who should receive Covid-19 vaccines.

Levi, who holds Israeli and American citizenship, has claimed that Covid-19 vaccines are the “most failing medical product in the history of medical products”, despite a body of research that has shown they are safe and effective. A modeling study published in 2022 in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet estimated that Covid-19 vaccines saved nearly 20 million lives in the first year they were available.

  • BillyClark@piefed.socialEnglish
    63·
    2 months ago

    That picture is from the CDC’s advisory committee on immunization whatnot from June of last year.

    You shouldn’t judge people by their appearance alone, but I think that if I was appointed to a position like that, and I had accepted the appointment despite it being outside of my field of expertise, I’d at least make myself presentable. You know, get a haircut for example. Because I’d want people to think I was taking the assignment seriously even though I was unqualified to even be allowed in the room.

    • massive_bereavement@fedia.io
      5·
      2 months ago

      I’m on the fence here: Definitely I judged the person on the photo because of their appearance, mostly because I didn’t know who they were and was ready to hate that person.

      A teaching moment, if any.

      That said, I’ll rather not ask someone to cut their hair because of the job position they uphold unless it is a public facing role.

      • BillyClark@piefed.socialEnglish
        4·
        2 months ago

        That said, I’ll rather not ask someone to cut their hair because of the job position they uphold unless it is a public facing role.

        My point is more that he’s a charlatan. Here’s a paragraph from his Wikipedia:

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retsef_Levi

        Levi is a critic of COVID-19 lockdowns and mRNA vaccines, and a COVID-19 vaccine skeptic. He has published papers on the mortality rates of COVID-19 vaccines. He wrote on Twitter in 2023 that “the evidence is mounting and indisputable that mRNA vaccines cause serious harm including death, especially among young people". On June 11, 2025, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, announced that he appointed Levi as one of the members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). However, Levi did not have medical, epidemiological, or immunological training, experience, or background.

        If he’s going to be a charlatan, he can at least try to be a good charlatan and groom himself. It would be different if he was actually a subject matter expert.